[Short Fiction] Wigger Gets Started (1990)
From the Upcoming Book of Short Fiction: "Wigger: Stories Of The 1990s"
Wigger wakes up with an erection pressed into the bed he has slept in since he was a child. At fourteen, he still feels like a boy, but the fist in his pants pumps and grinds like a man’s drill. Groaning, this is the first time he comes today. He opens his eyes to the cold dark of his clean new bedroom. He groans in a different way and reaches for the tissue box. Cold weather has come early to Southern Ohio in this zero year of the 1990s.
A bowl clangs on the counter downstairs, and his older and bigger step-brother’s changing voice cracks when he screams, echoing in the quiet kitchen. The old man is already off to work down near Cincinnati, where he manages the operations of a box manufacturing company. The school buses will be here for both of them soon, and there will be frantic stuffing of backpacks and fussing, filling up the five minutes before the first bus arrives. “Where’s my fucking trapper keeper?” Wigger finds it and tosses it to his stepfather’s son. The handsome older kid tells Wigger to fuck off and stuffs it in his cheap backpack. That’s as close as they get to thanks these days.
“See ya, faggot.” His step-brother’s new nickname for Wigger.
“Fuck off, dick.”
Wigger’s new brother by marriage turns around and flips him off with both hands while exiting to the garage through the laundry room door, kicking it shut with a shoe while still flipping both birds.
The zipper on Wigger’s backpack broke on the second day, forcing him to carry it by hand in a school where a little kid lugging a big backpack around bigger kids gets noticed. If he seems alone, he’s going to get fucked with, and Wigger is small but mean, so these situations have never ended well for him. He bit a kid’s earlobe off in the fifth grade, and because everyone was poor, nobody sued anyone, and that kid never came around causing trouble again. But that was a different school in a different state. These middle-class kids here had never seen or known hunger, but Wigger had, though he’d never felt it. And most of these parents had lawyers or knew one.
He gets on the bus and drops his heavy backpack into the dark seat beside him. Hands and backs must carry everything these children born in the 1970s need during their school day, from morning until late afternoon, when they arrive home. Most of these children are welcomed by empty houses because their parents work jobs and drive in traffic. There are no second chances for these kids to retrieve the things forgotten, and Wigger’s house is fifteen miles from the school, forty-five minutes by bus.
Wigger is small, barely over five feet. And he’s skinny, likely malnourished from a diet of microwaved junk food, cereal, sandwiches, pizza, nachos, and soda. All he does outside school is play video games, read books, and jerk off, which is a new way to amuse himself that his body just showed him one day. Sometimes, he wrote stories, mostly sexy ones, about the girls he couldn’t talk to during the day. He thought about them all week, all of them. Every class was an opportunity, but nothing about Wigger’s life is serious now except the art he loves and all these girls who seem ten years older than him, a little boy pretending to be a man because his boner is getting bigger and bringing him lots of pleasure, more pleasure than his toys, books, and movies. These girls are alive in his imagination, but their images and actions bend toward him in fantasies. They are so horny that he goes mad each day, navigating the thick fog of their lust in his mind. But he also has thoughts and fantasies pushed into the dark there, where he keeps the earlobe of that little boy, things he doesn’t take out and examine.
The bus bumps and rocks and makes its stops, careening through the suburban neighborhoods sprouting up in the middle of these farm fields like stubborn, angry weeds.
Each day here so far has been filled with a constant series of erections that have to be dealt with, sometimes in the school bathroom. On these cold morning bus rides in the dark, he’s started doing what he calls dick push-ups. He takes out one or two heavy textbooks and stacks them on his lap. Then he leans back and starts thinking about one of the pretty girls on the bus, their lips, and how they’d taste on his. From there, undressing and grunting, getting wet somehow, and he can hear the real-world voices of these impenetrable girls, low and giggling, so cute the things they talk about, whispering about boys and what happens when their pants come off. That’s what Wigger wants them to discuss because it’s what he wants to show them. Eventually, with his hands relaxed at his sides, the books start moving up and down on his lap. Dick push-ups for the day he gets to show one of these girls what’s been growing from inside him. But that’s the problem- no one does, and he can’t find a way to make it happen. If only he were good at sports, but five-foot skinny nothings don’t perform athletically. Reading is scorned here. He keeps his Stephen King paperbacks in his backpack for now. Movies are cool, but you go to them and don’t talk to anyone. Kids with friends watch movies on home rentals together, but Wigger doesn’t have home rental friends here yet in Ohio.
After a few minutes of these pushups, he gets bored since he can’t pull it out and play with it. So, instead, he puts the books back in his backpack, fixes his Walkman headphones, and then pushes play on Kool G. Rap’s debut. The cassette is spooled to begin at "Truly Yours." Wigger closes his eyes and recites the lyrics silently in his head to one of the most misogynistic rap tunes published at that time.
Music in Wigger’s 1980s was millions of people listening together to songs and records either played on the radio or put on in cars, bars, living rooms, and bedrooms. Music for Wigger in the 1990s happened in foam-covered headphones connected to a Walkman tape deck. Now, Wigger didn’t have a thing to do with Black people in New York City, but he knew Hip Hop from the Decatur record shops and the crowded bedrooms of his poor Black friends. Street poetry poured street stories into his head, and Wigger grew up next to the hungry, poor city school kids. He was fed fully but also aware of the hunger around him and his inability to do anything about it. In the early 1980s, Decatur, Illinois, was a melting pot of poor and middle-class people working to get by and get high. All the boys played with Star Wars toys because the grade schools had no money for sports teams. Sports were what happened on the playground during recess, and they were free. For these Illinois boys, that meant mostly spitting, fighting, and break-dancing under the jungle gym between kickball games. Wigger was okay at breaking. One of the tough little Black kids had mercy on him, took him under his wing, showed him things, and protected him when the bigger kids targeted Wigger for ridicule, which they always did because he was born small. Many of them found out he was also born mean. He could do the tick and understood the difference between the worm and the caterpillar. But his specialty was the robot, and he could once do it on roller skates.
Homeroom begins without anyone noticing him as if he’s invisible, though he is almost the same height as everyone else when sitting in desk chairs. Cute Tracy passes him a note that he thinks for a moment is for him but is disappointed to see her gesture for him to pass it to the football player Neil Brock, sitting in the row next to him. Neil reads the note and winks back at Tracy right through Wigger like he wasn’t there to facilitate whatever exchange of sentiment passed on that folded-up paper.
In fifth grade, before puberty started dividing children into haves and have nots, little Wigger was voted the cutest boy in class by the other little girls, and that started a phase of obsession with the girls in school that burns inside him today in this first official Gym class, where only boys surround him. Wigger doesn’t like Gym. The past three weeks have been spent in the classroom, learning the grueling process of dressing for sports at school in a cold room with other naked boys, showing up to the line in time for calisthenics, running ten laps like indentured captives, and then moving into the main set of rotating sports and games that will teach competition, team play, and personal achievement to a generation of American boys and girls, but Wigger wishes this class was happening to someone else.
He dresses in high-thigh athletic shorts with a white t-shirt handed to him by the gym teacher when he enters the locker room for this third-period Gym. From the waist down, he looks like bleached chopsticks poking out of a dirty napkin. The Gym teacher handed him a shirt and said, loud enough for the entire locker room to hear, “You look like a small guy.” Even nice kids snickered, but the worst shouted insults.
“Hey, it’s mice nuts!”
“Small balls!”
“Don’t worry, shrimp, your nuts’ll drop soon.”
Laughter like cold rain.
All these boys are bigger than Wigger, so he keeps quiet and swallows every insult, but the mercury in his angry thermometer is rising. He dresses in focused silence and tests the lock numbers before hanging it through the hole of his shut locker and latching it. The problems started almost immediately during calisthenics, which he had never done before. Sure, jumping jacks and the simple shit, but burpees? Never. He was learning on the fly and looked small, bouncing, and ridiculously uncoordinated. Almost immediately, the Juniors start making fun of him. Wigger laughs it off as best he can and tries to modify his actions to be more like the other boys, confident in swinging their limbs and moving their muscles. Jesus, how big are their muscles compared to the skinny little arms and legs he uses mostly to grab things and sit down?
But there is one older boy who isn’t laughing and who eventually has enough and tells the others around him, “Knock it the fuck off and pay attention!” Wigger looks at the gigantic boy who ended his torment. This massive, beefy boy might be the most handsome person Wigger’s ever seen outside a movie. Big! Almost six feet tall and muscles on top of muscles. His sandy blonde hair is a skater punk cut that hangs across his eyes, causing him to constantly jerk his head to swing his hair out of his gaze. The old boy’s face looks chiseled from a marble slab, with a strong jawline and a sharp, short beard. This kid looks like a pro wrestler, nodding (not smiling but not frowning) at Wigger like, “I got you, little man.” Wigger nods a thanks back, and they finish the calisthenics. But someone trips Wigger when they’re running laps, and he skins his knee on the gym floor to a soundtrack of scattered laughter echoing in a gymnasium pierced by dozens of sneaker squeaks. It’s all Wigger can do to stop crying before it starts, and what’s coming aren’t tears of sadness.
The disaster happens in the shower when his 10:45 erection arrives at the worst possible moment.
“Jesus, look how big that little kid’s dick is!”
“Eew, it’s hard! What a little faggot!”
“No, dude, it looks like that little midget’s dick in that porno!”
“YES! The Dwarf Dong Lord!”
“Dong LORD! DONG LORD! DONG LORD!” The steamy shower becomes louder than life while laughter and insults converge into a cacophony of noise, all bent toward him, moving at him, now through him. Something bad is about to happen.
But everything stops when Jimmy Prince enters the shower with his perfectly sculpted six-foot body and massive dick, even bigger than Wigger’s, because Jimmy looks like a family of mountain bears raised him. His dick is proportional to his massive body, but Wigger’s is not, and he looks like a freak to these boys with their normal and uninteresting little dicks.
Wigger would learn that Big Jimmy Prince’s life is about order. His meals and workouts, football practices, and classes are planned. He fills up his truck with gas on the same day every weekend, and the girls Big Jimmy digs out call him first to get on his schedule. But today, Jimmy Prince does something unplanned. He passes by his honorary first shower stall, closest to the doorway, and instead walks down to and turns on the spigot next to Wigger’s shower space.
All the boys are quiet while Jimmy lets the hot water run down his face and fall like a canyon river between his meaty pectorals, running rivulets over his abs, refracted through trimmed pubic hair, and launching off his flaccid massive penis like The Plunge waterslide at the Beach Water Park. After several seconds filled with the sound of water hitting the shower floor and the big drain taking it all away, Jimmy looks over and says to Wigger, loud so everyone can hear, “That’s a big dick, little man. Be careful where you stick that thing.” Some kids laugh, but most go back to showering in silence, and a few turn off their showers and leave.
Later, when everyone is dressed again in school clothes and the locker room boner story is just shooting gossip tendrils into the rest of the school, Jimmy Prince walks up behind Wigger on their way out of the gym and claps him on the shoulder. It feels like Hercules just laid a hand on him.
“My name’s Jimmy.” Wigger tells Jimmy his name. “Listen,” Jimmy says, “Where do you live?” Wigger tells him, and Jimmy says, “I’m going to pick you up Friday night, and you’re coming with me to the football rally. Afterwards, I’ll take you to Taco Bell, and you’re gonna meet some people.”
Wigger didn’t have time to react before Jimmy said, as if it were a fact, “You don’t worry about a fucking thing when you’re with me. You don’t pay for anything. You don’t do anything but keep your mouth shut and act cool. If you don’t know what it means to act cool, just shut up and think about it. You’ll figure it out. I’ll take care of the rest.” Jimmy takes his hand off Wigger’s shoulder and puts it out for slapping. Wigger smiles and slaps it, and it turns into shaking hands like a contract.
Jimmy smirks as a smile and says, “No one will ever fuck with you again.”
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Dude, I'm hooked already and can't wait to read the whole thing!